A lot of progress has been made on this project since my last post. The designs I included before do not represent, in any way, the finalized design. I’ve begun to collect all of the parts and will begin building this week. Cost is roughly $300-$500.

The design has gone through far too many revisions at this point, but this is important because of the complexity of the build. The mechanics are almost entirely defined with the exception of a few dimensions. Because this whole build is being turned into a tutorial for the community to work from everything has to be transferred to SolidWorks (work-in-progress). I’m partial to the idea that everything is defined so that anyone can follow along. For me this mainly means “I bought this piece here”, “this is exactly what I did to it”, and to be careful of including ”magic” steps. As a result of building this for the community to participate in I’ve also designed around what tools an average DIYer has access to. This limits the build to a small extent because precise pieces cannot be milled or turned. These constraints have also made the design process a lot of fun. It is a big puzzle that is now being assembled.